Unfortunately Illogical
by L-Ishida-Dark
Summary: In a narrative world, logic is a dangerous thing. Sadly for the Disc, logic incarnate has just joined the Watch. With a full cast of Watchmen, imps, Things, an insanely powerful wizard and a very confused foreigner, the world is in trouble. OC centric.
1. Something Starts

**1. Something Starts**

Thunder cracked around foreboding Überwaldian peaks as the rain lashed through the woods. Somewhere, mournfully, a wolf howled. Flickering firelight marked the peasant villages that made up a large proportion of Überwald's population. And in the laboratory tower of the von Baronheim castle, a wild laugh echoed into the depths of the night.

"Start ze mechanism, Igor! My greatest creation vill haff _life_!"

"I can't, marthter."

Count von Baronheim lowered his arms from the traditional 'triumphant evil' position and blinked at his servant. "Excuse me?"

"I thaid I can't, marthter. Thith ith the firtht dethent thunderthtorm we've had in monthth, marthter, and it'th not even clothe." Igor sighed, gathering up scattered equipment from the Count's cluttered lab bench. "If you athk me, marthter, it'th not natural."

"You think I do not _know_ zat, Igor? Ze whole _purpose_ of ze experiment vos to create ze lightening I need to power my laboratory!" The Count sighed and shook his leonine head. "Ve just do not get ze same vezzer as ve used to. Vezzer vos better in ze old days."

"Actually, marthter, I don't think it'th that." In response to his master's raised eyebrow, Igor elaborated. "I wath talking to my couthin Igor…"

"Ze vun who vorks viz Mad Doctor Eyeball?"

"That'th what I thaid, marthter. Igor. And they have had abtholutely no problemth with the weather, marthter. In fact, Igor wath jutht telling me how the doctor…"

"Sorry I'm late, Father!" A skinny young man slammed open the door, sending several items of priceless apparatus shivering onto the floor. Count von Baronheim winced as the tinkle of glass died away, as did the boy. "Sorry. Did it vork? Ze device?"

The Count gestured wordlessly at the empty container, where all present were aware that manufactured lightening should be leaping around like very drunken dancers. The boy's face fell.

"Ze _device_ is flawless, Erich," the old man informed him dolefully. "Ze vezzer, however, continues fine."

"It is a really interesting vezzer pattern, Father," Erich agreed. "I sink it might be a sort of permanent antizyclone around ze mountain…I'm goink to read up on it, but I'm sure it must be zat." Tapping his finger on his lip thoughtfully, he looked up at the great windows of his father's laboratory. The Count and Igor, however, just looked at him.

Erich von Baronheim was tall and skinny, like many Überwaldian boys his age, and could, at a stretch and in a fairly dark room, be called handsome, but although there was nothing wrong with any given feature of his face (except maybe the odd pimple), it looked sort of wrong, almost gangly, if such a term can be applied to a face. It looked like he had been put together in a hurry at short notice, and he was still waiting to grow into himself.

He stared up at the sky with a look of mild interest in his brown eyes, then turned away. "I haff to go und check my rain collectors and my vezzer vane readings, zen, Father. If I do enough research, I should be able to calculate vot is happenink viz ze vezzer." He barely even saw the worried look on his father's face begin to grow.

"Und zen?" the old man asked half-hopefully. "Ve can vork on ze vezzer-alteration-devices togezzer, father und son?"

"I don't know about zat, Father," Erich replied diplomatically. "Theoretically it's possible but I sink ve should be sinkink in terms of livink in harmony vis ze vezzer…I vill sink about it."

He headed back out of the poorly-lit room as abruptly as he had come in, albeit with less breakages. Behind him, the Count sank into his favourite leather chair, head in his hands.

"Whithky, marthter?"

"Haff ve got anyzink stronker?"

"Right away, thur."

As Igor filled the air with a comfortable clanking of mysterious bottles, the Count raised his head to stare blankly at the useless apparatus in front of him. He dragged one long-fingered hand through his wild white hair with a long sigh. "Vot am I goink to do?" he asked the distant lightening. "Nozzink has gone right in my life for sixteen years. Not since Marrietta died. Even ze _volves_ haff forsaken me!"

"You have your thon, thur," Igor reminded him, pushing a very odd concoction into his master's slack hand. Igor was capable of producing alcohol from perfectly normal ingredients which gave a similar effect to drinking a dwarf tavern dry in one go, so when the Count sipped it, he did so rather gingerly.

"Yes, I've alvays got Erich." The Count let out another noisy sigh and risked gulping down a little more of Igor's potent cocktail. "But Erich is…you know ven it vos sunny ze ozzer day? He vent to ze Roots Plateau because he said it vos a perfect day for science! Science! On a sunny day! Vot good is science if you can't do it in ze stormy night? And zis whole business viz ze vezzer…research and vorkink in harmony viz nature…vot is ze von Baronheim name comink to? Vunce, ve vere ze greatest scientists in Uberwald…in ze vurld. And now…" He made a mournful noise in the back of his throat and raised his glass theatrically to the heavens. "Vot can I ever do to make him learn, though? Ze lightening has forsaken me, and ze magic of my science viz it! I am a broken man!"

Igor gave the Count a moment to recover, then leant slightly over the arm of the chair. "Marthter, if I may make a thuggethtion?" Taking his master's sullen silence as leave to continue, he duly did so. "My nephew Igor, he workth with the Watch in Ankh Morpork. They're alwayth on the lookout for promithing new recruitth, he thayth, thur. It could make a man of him, thur. Thtop him fooling around with thith rethearch buthineth and get down to thome real thienthe."

It had to be said, the Count was not utterly convinced at first. But Igor was very convincing, as was his potent alcohol, and so it was that Erich von Baronheim, last son of the great von Baronheim family, left home a few weeks later on the mail coach to Ankh-Morpork, earnestly clutching a bulging suitcase and a letter of recommendation addressed to Commander Samuel Vimes.

Almost as soon as he had disappeared out of sight down the long, winding road to the village, Igor heard a wolf howl in the woods. He smiled lopsidedly. It was the first time wolves had been heard so near the von Baronheim castle since Erich had been born. There was going to be a storm tonight, too. He could feel it in the sticky static of the air.

But most of all, what Igor felt as he hurried off to prepare the lightening rods was a sense of overwhelming lightness. For though he would never admit it, something about the young master evoked a very un-Igor-like sense of unease, as though the separate body parts sewn into the whole were trying to go back to being dead. No, it was certainly good that Erich had gone off to seek his fortune a long, _long_ way from Igor.

Later that night, amid the cackling and flashes of lightening, Count von Baronheim made his first major discovery since the birth of his son, and very pleased it made him, too. But that's not relevant right now. What's relevant to the story…and could, in fact, be relevant to the survival of the Disc itself…was at that point fast asleep, sandwiches half-eaten on his lap, as the mail coach crossed the Überwaldian border on its fateful path to Ankh Morpork.

---

A/N: This is a story which has been trying to chew its way out of my head for a long time now, and so I am finally setting it free to run through golden meadows or whatever the hell happy stories do. Concrit is more than appreciated, I am BEGGING for decent concrit. 


	2. Not Quite Paved With Gold

**2. Not Quite Paved With Gold**

The first thing Erich noticed about Ankh Morpork was the noise. After the placid silence of his homeland, the babble of voices, the clatter of carts, the clamour of people variously crying their wares, crying people's names and crying for help, it all hit him like the audio version of a brick to the head.

And when the door opened, well. If the sound was an audial brick, the smell was the olfactory equivalent of a high-rise building falling on him. He followed the bustling old woman who he had been bearing the company of for the last day to the coach door, and paused for a moment.

To a boy for whom, previously, the term 'urban metropolis' would have conjured up an image of the one-and-a-half horse town of Bad Schlechtsburg, a good five hour's hard walk from the castle, it was all very overwhelming. The people hurried by, faces innumerable, and none of them paid the slightest bit of notice to the pale, pimply boy hovering hunched in the doorway of the coach.

"'Ere, guv, I 'aven't got all day, you know." The coachman scowled back at him from the front. "Got to get 'er loaded up for the Sto Lat delivery, dun' I?"

"Oh. Sorry."

And Erich von Baronheim stepped forth into the first day of his bright new life in Ankh Morpork.

Upon which somebody stole his wallet. More specifically, somebody kicked him in the shins hard enough that he heard a distinct crack, headbutted him in the stomach and pushed him into an alley, where a similarly accommodating gentleman was waiting with a cosh, and he awoke some hours later to _find_ somebody had stolen his wallet. And his suitcase, and his coat. Which was in fact incidental to the fact that he seemed to be lying in not insubstantial amounts of his own blood.

The sky had darkened from smoggy city noon to smoggy city twilight by the time he awoke, and it was several shades closer to night by the time he stood up rather unsteadily, supporting himself against the wall and trying not to imagine what lent the wall its slightly slimy texture. Gingerly, almost afraid of what he might find, Erich touched his half-closed left eye, feeling bruises under his fingertips. He winced, probing the other parts of his face. Erich had always prided himself on his hereditary ability to think clearly whilst in pain; it had only just occurred to him that possibly it was just that he had never previously been in enough pain to limit his thinking. By the feel of it, several ribs were broken, and his left wrist felt odd. And his mouth tasted of copper and loose teeth.

Through the muzzy haze of the Thieves' Guild's finest handiwork, Erich managed to locate a few coherent thoughts. The Watch. Commander Vimes. Do what he came to do. Make a proper man of you.

Well, the only sort of man the city had made him so far was a very sore one, but perhaps the Watch was supposed to do the rest. Trying to ignore the stabbing pains in his chest, he limped out of the alleyway and headed in the vague direction of Pseudopolis Yard.

---

A throat cleared in a quiet firelit room. "Commander Vimes?"

"Huh? Wstfksgwn?!" Commander Vimes replied intelligently, and jerked upwards in the classic 'I'm working, honestly' pose of the recently-comatose. His look dared the hapless watchman in front of him to comment. "What is it? I'm very busy with the paperwork from the Wraith case."

"Uh. There's a young man here to see you, sir. Got a nice black eye and blood all over his face. Says his bags got nicked when he arrived." The stocky young watchman sensibly forbore to remark on the pooling dribble all over the paperwork from the Wraith case, and similarly withheld comment on the inky marks on the Commander's poorly-shaven cheek.

"Send him to talk to Angua, then. She's on desk duty tonight, isn't she?"

"Yes sir. But he says he wants to talk to you in person, sir."

"I'm _busy_, man. If some kid is too dumb to pay up his Thieves' Guild subscription, that's a matter for the officer on desk duty. I know you're new to the force, but I'd expect a Shades boy like you to know that." Vimes picked up a pen, arranging his face into a serious, desk-work expression.

"It's not that, sir. He says he came to Ankh Morpork to see you, sir."

Vimes gave a sigh which somehow managed to mingle irritation with an almost undetectable relief at a momentary reprieve from paperwork, put down his pen and picked up a cigar instead. He lit it, and sat in silence for a moment, watching the increasingly nervous constable in front of him. "Fine," he said eventually. "Send him in."

---

"This'd better be good. I've got work to do, you know." The cigar shifted from one corner of Vimes' mouth to the other. Erich could feel the Commander's eyes on him, and it made him very uncomfortable. He knew what a mess he looked; the blonde sergeant on the front desk had found him a new shirt from the evidence locker to replace his bloody and ripped one (somehow, it was impossible not to feel sympathy for someone as utterly pathetic as Erich), and he'd spent the bare minimum of time in the dingy washroom cleaning the blood off his face, but he was acutely aware of the purple and red mess of his eye, the blood matting parts of his hair and the stagger with which he had entered the room. Not to mention his pimples and greasy hair. He tried to stand to attention, but instead doubled over as something pulled on his broken ribs.

"Oh hells," Vimes said, "sit down before you fall down, man." He gestured at the chair in front of Erich, who was only too happy to do as he was told. The rest was like balm to his tired body. He didn't realise how much he was drifting until Vimes' voice brought him back to earth. "Well? What is it?"

"Oh." Erich tried to sit up and gave in. "Um. My name is Erich von Baronheim, Commander, und I came from Überwald zis mornink. My father sent a message via zer clacks, sir, und I did haff a letter of recommendation but it vos in my case and my case vos taken ven I vos attacked, but I vant to join zer Vatch, sir, because my father thinks it vill make a man out of me. I von't be very good on the street, sir, but I am very good at science, so if zat doesn't vork out I thought I could do somesink useful in forensics."

Vimes puffed on his cigar.

"Wait a minute. You came here instead of finding a doctor because you wanted a _job_?"

"Yes. Um. Is zat alright?"

"Apart from being bloody stupid, yes, it's fine. I don't want stupid coppers, Mister von Baronheim."

"Oh. Erm. I am sorry, I only vanted to…"

"Are you bloody stupid, Mister von Baronheim? Or did you just do a bloody stupid thing?"

Erich resisted the urge to turn and run, and stared at his hands instead, which wasn't much comfort. "I think…" He picked at dirt under his nails. Überwaldian dirt. From his expedition to the Roots the day before. "I think I did a bloody stupid thing, sir. Und I think I vill try not to be bloody stupid."

"Good man." Vimes almost smiled, and took his cigar out of his mouth. "We'll swear you in once you've seen a good doctor. Oh, and Mister von Baronheim?"

Erich paused in the painful process of hoisting himself out of the chair. "Yes, sir?"

"You're not a vampire or anything, are you?"

"No, sir. Just human."

"Oh. You look a bit vampiric around the eyes, you know."

"It's probably zer blut all over my face, sir."

"Yeah. Come back when you look less like the wrong end of a beaten mule, alright?"

Limping slightly and holding his side, Erich left. Vimes watched him go with a sigh. As if he wasn't busy enough. People shouldn't be allowed to come and bother people just to ask for a job. That's what he had people for.

He glanced at the darkening sky outside the window. Sybil would want him home soon. It was bad enough in her book that he'd gone back to the Yard after reading to Young Sam, not for a dramatic midnight chase but for godsdamned _paperwork_. Anyway, he was tired. Absently, he checked his watch.

The hands were stuck at 9:49. Outside, Old Tom began to toll its heavy silences. Vimes glared at the little thing in his hand, banged it off the desk a couple of times on general principle, and then opened up the back.

The imp inside was gone. Evaporated. Instead, around its little seat, metal discs had begun to grow, as if the watch was trying to organically change into one of those newfangled clockwork thingummys.

"Oh ......," Vimes swore around Old Tom's chimes, "it's .........ng magic."

----

A/N: The plot thickens slightly, as I stir the flour of plot twistery into the dough of the story and leave it to rise. I'm not entirely confident about my Vimes voice, and still stumbling on the accents a bit, so let me know what you think, ok? Or sink. Or zink. WHAT IS IT?


	3. Great Balls Of Fire

**3. Great Balls Of Fire**

Erich did come back, and he did look at least _slightly_ less like the wrong end of a beaten mule. His broken wrist was reset and parcelled in a sling, the gash under his hair had been stitched tightly shut, and his black eye had ripened to full-on green and purple splendour to the point of near-blindness. Of course, his suitcase and his wallet were long gone into the vaults of the Thieves' Guild, so he had no spare clothes, but he had done his upper-class best to wash his bloodstained shirt, and luckily Igor had had the foresight (informed by his Morporkian uncle Igor) to sew several gold coins into various hems of his clothes, meaning that at least Erich wasn't indebted to the doctor who treated him - being indebted to a Ankh Morpork doctor tended to lead to them undoing the work they'd done, with a little extra as interest. So as he walked into the Watch house early next morning, the overwhelming effect Lance-constable Salacia received was that of a kind of missing link between Igor and mankind.

But he made it all the way through the swearing-in and _almost_ all the way through Sally's harried tour of the watch house without staggering too much, although a combination of exhaustion and the smell of Watchmen in the locker room proved too much for him, and he had to be provided with reviving coffee in the cafeteria.

Over reviving coffee, both of them became increasingly aware that, despite the obvious similarities, they had surprisingly little in common. Sally was the suave and intelligent Uberwaldian that Erich had always failed to be, while Sally left their little chat with the strong impression that, despite his obvious failings, Erich had a level of naïve integrity previously seen in a very specific group of people, which included a very select few small children and Captain Carrot. He was, in fact, as Commander Vimes put it when she reported back to him, "the very helpful kind of bloody stupid. He's not a long-lost king, is he? Or some kind of hero?"

"I doubt it, sir. He tripped over his own feet leaving the interview room. Plus there's the acne. Long-lost kings almost _never_ get spotty."

"Hmph. Well, you can't put him on the beat in his condition. Send him over to the UU, Lance-Constable. Those bloody wizards have been mucking around again. Might as well get the lad to do _something_ useful on his first day on the force."

---

Sally found Erich in the locker room again, holding his breath as he struggled into a battered second-hand breastplate. She watched silently for a few minutes, almost wincing in sympathy, and eventually gave up, walked over and buckled it on, careful of his broken ribs.

"Thank you, Lance-Constable," Erich said sheepishly, bending stiffly to pick up his sword. "I am very much better und I am ready to be valking 'on zer beat'"

"Of course you are," Sally said dryly, and handed him his helmet with an air of resignation. "The sergeant was surprised you even came in today. She said you were pretty beaten up." She glanced at the bruised and broken Erich, and corrected herself. "_Are_ pretty beaten up. Look, the Commander wants you to talk to the wizards."

"Vizards? But Corporal Nobbs said zey vere subtle und qvick to anger, und also zat zey vere a bunch of…I did not know a lot of zer vords he used. Vhy am I goink to talk to zer vizards?"

"Because the Commander wants you to." _And because you'll die if you go out on the beat in that condition_, hung unspoken in the air. Sally shook her head and gestured for Erich to follow her. "Look, Constable, there've hardly been _any_ inexplicable phenomonas since yesterday, just a lot of what the Commander likes to call bloody weirdness. That usually means the wizards have been messing around."

"But phenomena and veirdness are zer same thing, surely?"

Sally sighed and rolled her eyes. "No. How did you manage to grow up in the Old Country and not learn the difference? Never mind. You know how to get to the Unseen University, right?"

"I think so."

---

Three hours later, and lucky not to have suffered a repeat of yesterday's little incident (although, of course, it was part of the unspoken rules of the city that only terminally stupid people attacked members of the Watch without good reason, because if you attacked one then the _whole_ Watch would give you good enough reason), Erich managed to find the main gate of the UU. Ten minutes later, he found the knocker. A bledlow opened the small side door and, after being told earnestly and in heavily-accented Morporkian of Constable von Baronheim's duty, led him to the Archchancellor's Study with not a little bad grace.

Chaos followed in their wake.

As Erich passed by, spells stopped and fireballs fizzled out. Which would have been a lot more of a problem if the Ravening Sock Beast and the Voracious Underwear Monster at which said fireballs were aimed had not collapsed into stacks of dirty laundry at much the same time. Now, of course, the only problem was persuading the suddenly very disinterested wizards and students to clear up their damn underwear instead of edging away. Imminent danger was one thing, imminent labour quite another.

And imminent labour, although he hadn't realised it yet, was about to place its beady eye on Archchancellor Ridcully (or at least on his impressive pointy hat) and bark at him to, as it were, tidy his room if he wanted any pocket money.

And when a wizard is told to metaphorically tidy his room, you can bet imminent danger is not too far behind.

But as of yet, the problem was only just beginning. And the clock started ticking the moment Erich stepped through the door of the Archchancellor's Study, at which point the crossbow bolts Ridcully was shooting at the target on the back of the door completely failed to amusingly strike either Erich _or_ the bledlow.

It was getting worse. Now even the universal laws of humour were failing.

"Yes, what is it?"

The force of Mustrum Ridcully's unexpectedly booming voice sent the nervous Erich literally stumbling back a step. His hands were sweating, and his voice came out a little thin and reedy when he spoke. "Ah, um, I am Constable von Baronheim of zer City Vatch. Um. Commander Vimes sent me to, ah…" He checked the painstaking notes on the inside of his pale wrist. "…um, investigate reports of certain, um, slight disturbances in zer normal runnink of zer city and zer sudden uprise in bloody veirdness. Sir."

Ridcully regarded him from the small window of face between hat and beard. What he saw didn't so much scream _first year student_ as grab him by the over-embellished collar and shake him, yelling _teenagerteenagerteenager_ between sporadic cries for its mother. The spots, the nerves, the greasy hair, the watery eyes, the earnest attitude, the general skinny awkward _Erichness_ of Erich was like the memory of a thousand open days and fresher weeks combined into one person. One person with a City Watch badge.

Ridcully lowered his crossbow.

"Couldn't come himself, then? Don't blame him, busy man, busy man!" he said in a tone of transparent faux-cheeriness that suggested he _did_ blame him and that Commander Vimes would, if he was not polite enough to come in in person in the future, find himself a busy frog, busy frog. "Why's he calling on us about bloody vei…I mean weirdness, then?" Erich's laboured Morporkian was slightly infectious. "Perfectly natural phenomena, nothing to worry about."

"Vell, um, sir, zese are not inexplicable phenomena. Zey are a little bit different." He held out a smudged iconograph hesitantly. Ridcully took it, not hesitantly, and turned it around several times.

"One of those new-fangled thingummys, isn't it? All springs and cogs, Never saw the appeal of it, really, but-"

Erich summoned up the tatters of his confidence and cleared his throat nervously. "Um, except zat it used to be vun of zose old-fangled thinkummys, sir. It had an imp in it, and zen…"

Ridcully ruminated for a moment, an unusual occurrence when quantum magic or a choice between dinner menus was not involved. It all reminded him uncomfortably of the trolleys. Next thing, it would be Things. Ghastly thought, really.

"So if you could, erm, be 'knockink it off', zat vould be-"

The door burst open again, and a boy a few years older than Erich burst in, panting with exertion, eyes wide. "Archchancellor! It's Tomas! He's gone critical again! Outside the…DUCK!"

"Outside the duck? That's-" Ridcully was borne down by the combined weight of the two boys as a colossal fireball vaporised a section of the outside wall and blazed into the room

And then collapsed into a point of heat that went beyond mere white heat, which stopped for a split-second, then winked out.

Ridcully got up and dusted himself off. "Honestly, I don't know why you had to go and do that. I just had my robe cleaned, and after all Tomas is up to you chaps over at the HEM to sort out. There was no call to get so excite…a…ble…"

He followed their horrified gaze. There was a very copious hole in the wall behind the Archchancellor's desk. Well, less a hole, more a copious lack of wall. With singed bits around the edges. Ridcully took the bottle of Bentinck's Very Old Peculiar from his hat and took a sip slightly dazedly. "Well. I think I'd best talk to Tomas, calm him down a bit, that kind of thing."

The Archchancellor swept out of the room, bottle in hand, and the student trailed after him. The awkwardness felt by every visitor when an unavoidable situation occurs gave Erich two options; stay in the study and leaf through the Archchancellor's belongings, or follow them. He didn't know what would happen if you leafed through a wizard's belongings, but he'd rather not find out. He glanced out of the window, where the immaculate lawn they had skirted on the way in was a rather less immaculate mess of blackened earth and oddly-coloured grass, then fled after Ridcully and the young man before they could get too far ahead.

---

A/N: Nyeh, even more plot-thickery. Next chapter, we will meet the mysterious Tomas and his fiery balls! NYEH!


End file.
